Voices for Social Justice in the Gig Economy: Where Labor, Policy, Technology, and Activism ConvergeVoices for Social Justice in the Gig Economy, Michelle Rodino-Colocino.
This research discusses the App-Based Driver Association, looking specifically at Seattle. There’s no “there” for gig economy work: previous spaces of organising, such as the shop floor, aren’t available. One space is a parking lot, where people sit waiting to get lifts. There’s one shady tree, where people tend to converge. Another space is an Ethiopian grocery store, as many drivers are East African. The ABDA is largely funded and supported by the teamsters. Drivers interviewed definitely understand that they’re producing for Uber, and that they’re being exploited. They spoke about the challenges of planning – they can’t go watch a movie. Above all, Uber sells drivers’ availability. One driver was told: “we can always get another Mohammed”. Drivers feel dehumanized. They’re not provided with toilets, there’s nowhere to pray. They’re also cautious about organising, as Uber is clearly anti-union.

Work in the European Gig Economy. Kaire Holts, University of Hertfordshire. This research aims to survey and measure the extent and characteristics of crowd work in Europe. Working conditions are characterised by precariousness (including frequent changes to pay levels), unpredictability, work intensity, the impact of customer ratings, abuse from customers, and poor communication with platform staff (including a lack of face to face contact, and no social etiquette). One driver was asked to deliver drugs to a criminal gang late at night. When she told the platform about it they said it was her responsibility to check what was in the bags. Workers face both physical risks and stresses, and issues with mental health. There are some attempts at collective representation of platform workers in Europe. In UK, for example, there’s the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain delivering Deliveroo drivers, and the United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) representing Uber drivers.

Reimagining Work [didn’t quite catch the current title], Laura Forlano. This draws on a project with Megan Halpern, using workshops and games that helped people collaborate to imagine what work might look like in the future. One participation spoke up the importance of the shift from talking around around each other to needing to actually physically move as part of the workshop process. Shifts in work are linked to reimagining the city as a (new, urban) factory, so we need to reimagine relationships between work, technology, and the city to embed social justice values into our future.

Information and the Gig Economy. Brian Dolber.
Talks about shifting from a tenure-track position to adjunct work, and then taking up work with Uber and Unite Here (campaigning against Airbnb). From 2008 to 2012, Silicon Valley received little of the broader critique addressed at capitalism more generally. Silicon Valley can be seen within Nancy Fraser’s concept of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, but we’re also seeing a shift towards an emergent neofascism. Airbnb’s valuation is greater than all the hotel chains, which is odd when we think about ‘hosts’ as small business owners. Airbnb has created online communities called ‘Airbnb citizen’ which aim to mobilise hosts to affect city policy. The narrative is very much about facilitating people staying in their homes, paying medical bills, supporting the creative industries, which Dolber argues is cultivating a petit bourgeois attitude that shifts us towards an emergent neofascism.

Power Politics of Resistant Media: Critical Voices From Margins to Center

The opening speaker (whose name I unfortunately didn’t get) discusses the ways in which pop feminism works, and the complexity of vulnerability. There’s a distorted mirroring of vulnerability between popular feminism and white misogyny.

Polemology: counterinsurgency and culture jamming, Jack Bratich.
We need a genealogy to elaborate and understand the persistence and connection of struggles across time.

Rosemary Clark-Parsons (University of Pennsylvania) will discuss de Certeau’s concept of “tactics” within the context of her ethnographic work among grassroots feminist collectives in the city of Philadelphia. She focuses on ‘girl army’, a secret Facebook group developed as a space for women and nonbinary people to share experiences. Tilly and Tarrow’s definition of contentious politics would exclude this group, which isn’t in line with women and nonbinary people’s solidarity and organising work within the group. De Certeau’s concept of tactics allows us to take the everyday seriously; can teach us about strategies; and allows explicit recognition of agency within systems of power. There are limitations, too, including issues with addressing differential access to agency, and theorizing structural change over time. The strategies/tactics binary can be reductive and reify power relations.

#HashtagActivism: race and gender in America’s Networked Counterpublics. Sarah J. Jackson (Northeastern University). Networked counterpublics theory is one way to understand how marginalised communities create their own public spheres. Mainstream media coverage of the public response to #myNYPD mostly treated it as ‘trolling’, or a PR disaster, that could happen to anyone. In the coverage of #Ferguson, there was a flow of the narrative from ordinary people’s framing through to social movement organisations, and finally the media. #GirlsLikeUs is a useful case, because even within counterpublics, there are people at the margins, who produce their own counter-counterpublics.

Jessa Lingel (University of Pennsylvania) focused on “mainstream creep,” referring to the uneasy relationships between countercultural communities and dominant media platforms, where the former uses the latter reluctantly or in highly-limited ways. How do we construct particular bodies as vulnerable: the language of ‘marginalised people’ is important for understanding structures of power, but does it also construct people as essentially weaker?

Gendered Voices and Practices of Open Peer ReviewI opened this panel by reflecting on some of the ways in which I am currently trying to understand, and reconfigure, my approaches to both mothering and academia. I’ll put up a blog post about this later.

The Fembot Collective’s Global South Initiatives. Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University. Problems for women in academia in the Global South start with the much-more-oppressive system of neocolonialism. To participate in autoethnography or other feminist methodologies would be a problem because it’s devalued within universities that see it as navel-gazing. Women need to publish in top-tier journals in order to be successful (or even survive) within their academic spaces. How do we as feminist publishers work with women in the Global South to help them access the resources that their institutions value? How do we support them without asking them to do a lot of extra activist work within their institutions? We need to think about power differences within the networks of solidarity and resistance we build across borders. It’s a messy terrain. We need to work to allow women in academia in the Global South to get access to a space where they can speak (and be heard).

Voicing New Forms of Scholarly Publishing. Sarah Kember, Goldsmith’s, University of London. There’s a seismic shift happening at the moment in academic publishing. Revolution and disruption are not the same thing. We need to understand this within the context of efforts to police and politicise scholarly practices: there’s no distinction between these two at the moment. We need to both uphold something (the trust in academic work), but also change it (the opacity of peer review processes). We’re currently seeing a “pay to say” model of academic publishing in open access, at least in the UK. “Openness” works in different ways, with an asymmetrical structure. Goldsmiths has to be open, Google doesn’t. “Open access” publishing is often incredibly expensive, especially where academics are pushed to continue publishing with traditional academic publishers. Kember cites ADA as a big intervention in these models. The disruptions of scholarly publishing models is a by-product of neoliberalism. The disruption of academia isn’t. We need to restate the university press mission, revise it, and rethink it. The policies around scholarly publishing need careful examination. The issue is not about adding ever-more OA panels, which are entrepreneurial, and technicist.

Peer Review is Dead, Long Live Peer Review: Conflicts in the Field of Academic Production. Bryce Peake, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Academics often undertake review because it gives access to particular networks. Women tend to receive much more negative feedback from review, and to engage in (be asked to do?) more peer review. There are different ways of understanding peer review: as enforcer (for example, of particular norms), networker, gatekeeper (of one particular journal), and/or mentor.

Ada and Affective Labor. Roopika Risam, Salem State University. ADA and the peer review process intervenes in scholarly systems, but is at risk particularly because of that. Risam talks about an experience drawing on theory from the margins: journal editors for a journal with a more experimental peer review process decided to shift from post-publication review to the traditional peer review process. Generosity in peer review is not the same as being ‘nice’: it’s about the level of engagement in the process. It means that the community takes seriously the project that the author is engaged in, rather than what they think the author should be doing. This means that the community has developed and perpetuated a set of norms. Even when editors are advising authors that their text is not ready for publishing, they are kind. Too often, ‘rigor’ has been set up as opposing kindness. This kind of peer review presents a challenge to the masculinist mode of academic production: it’s collectivist rather than individualist, seeing knowledge as an open system rather than a closed hierarchy. How can we look at the intersection of rigor and kindness? Scholarship is more rigorous when it makes its multiple genealogies visible, writing voices which have been made invisible back into academia.

Carol Stabile, in beginning discussion, prompted us to read Toward a Zombie Epistomology by Deanna Day, asking whether we should be should be considering a nonreproductive (or even antireproductive) approach to academia: one not concerned with leaving behind a specific legacy, either institutional or theoretical. Radhika’s answer was very much in line with my thinking on this: that in trying to rethink our approach not only to academia but also to mothering, she (and I) want to think of mothering not as a process of reproducing ourselves, but as a way of making space for children (and students, and colleagues) to be their own people. Thinking about the important challenges and prompts that (re)reading Revolutionary Mothering, The Argonauts, and more informal conversations with the many amazing people I know reflecting on their parenting experiences, have given me, I’d add that it’s also important to consider the ways in which feminist practices of peer review (and academia more generally), should not only not be about reproducing ourselves, but should be about allowing ourselves to be changed.

There was also some excellent discussion about the role of institutions (like the committees that evaluate promotions and tenure), and citation practices. In a response to a question about how to balance attempts to create change against the requirements of tenure, Carol and Sarah spoke on the importance of joining evaluation panels, both to get a better understanding of how they work and to intervene in them. Sarah notes that when we’re forced to write and research more quickly, it can be hard to find sources to draw on beyond the standard offerings. (I’ve particularly noted this myself: after managing not to cite any men, I think, in my last publication before giving birth, my writing since referring to work has relied far more heavily on the most well-known literature.) Sarah prompts peer reviewers to actively consider the breadth of sources that research draws on.

Love, Sex, Friendship: LGBTQ Relationships and IntimaciesLover(s), Partner(s), and Friends: Exploring Privacy Management Tactics of Consensual Non-Monogamists in Online Spaces. Jade Metzger, Wayne State University. In 1986 a researcher surveyed around 3,000 people, and found that 15-28% of that population didn’t define themselves as monogamous, and more recent research has also found that many young people don’t define themselves as not strictly monogamous. Consensual non-monogamy is often stigmatised. How do we understand disclosure of consensual non-monogamy? Metzger notes that one of the main researchers in this area doesn’t engage in consensual non-monogamy herself. Metzger’s research, which included open-ended interviews and self-disclosure, found that self-disclosure varied, including ‘keeping it an open secret’, using ambiguous terms (like ‘friend’ or ‘partner…s’), or using terms open to interpretation (‘cuties’, ‘comets’, ‘cat’). Reasons cited for privacy included family disapproval, repercussions at work, harm to parental custody, and general discomfort. Privacy is often negotiated at the small-group community level: self-disclosure often implicates others. For some, social media is a risk that has to be navigated carefully: blocking family, for example, or using multiple accounts. Often, it can be hard not to be connected online: it can be painful to not be able to acknowledge people important to you online. Some sites don’t allow you to list multiple partners, embedding heteronormativity into their structure. We need to see privacy as negotiated at the community level (as opposed to individually, as many neoliberal approaches to privacy understand it). The transparency of networks on social media places risks and burdens on those wanting (or needing) to remain private.

Does Gender Matter? Exploring Friendship Patterns of LGBTQ Youth in a Gender-Neutral Environment. Traci Gillig, USC Annenberg, Leila Bighash, USC – Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Gender is not a binary, but we constantly encounter spaces structured by the social gender binary, and gender stereotypes. Gender is a major driver of peer relationships among youth, including LGBTQ people. This research looked at the Brave Trails LGBTQ youth camp, which is gender neutral. Gillig and Bighash found that here, were students weren’t separated out by gender, friendship groupings didn’t cluster by gender.

Hissing and Hollering: Performing Radical Queerness at Dinner. Greg Niedt, Drexel University. The word ‘radical’ is often seen as a confrontational challenge to the mainstream, which is certainly a part of it. But radical queerness can also be about more quiet, everyday moments of queerness: the queer ordinary. In discussing radical queer ‘family dinners’, there is an act of radical queerness to reconstituting family as chosen family. Radical Faeries came out of activism in the 1970s, borrowing – or appropriating – from various forms of paganism and spirituality. Harry Hay was particularly central (and some of his statements about what it means to be queer are kind of what you might expect from a relatively privileged white man). Existing research is limited, and focuses on the high ritual and performativity. Niedt focuses, instead, on weekly fa(e)mily dinners in Center City Philadelphia. The research methodology drew on Dell Hymes (1974).

Music in Queer Intimate Relationships. Marion Wasserbauer, Universiteit Antwerpen. Thea DeNora discusses music as a touchstone of social relations, but there’s a dearth of beographical analysis of sociological study of music consumption. Wasserbauer talked about one interview in which a 44-year-old woman tracked the entanglement of her relationship with music, and how after the breakup she’d never experienced music again. Another 27-year-old-woman, who mostly enjoyed classical and 1920s music, found herself almost crying at a Bryan Adams concert she attended because a woman she was in a relationship with loved him so much.

I rounded out the day at an excellent panel with Maria Bakardjieva, Jakub Macek, Alena Macková, and Monika Metykova (I think – the last two were not listed in the program), discussing attacks on media and political freedoms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Metykova outlined the incredibly worrying range of attacks on independent press and political opposition in Hungary (some of which are outlined here), noting that these have been legal and difficult to fully track, let alone resist. Becasue there a small audience (the last panel on the last day sadly often suffers), it was more of a discussion and I didn’t take notes in the panel, but I strongly encourage you to follow up the speakers’ work – and the situation in Central and Eastern Europe. It was a bit strange to me that ICA as an institution did little to address the specific situation of communications in the Czech Republic – the odd floating ‘placelessness’ of Western-centric academia (with numerous panels addressing US politics).

Activism and Social MediaMamfakinch: From Protest Slogan to Mediated Activism. Annemarie Iddins, Fairfield University. [CN: rape.]
Iddens argues that the digital must be understood as part of a network of different media – the Mamfakinch collective only makes sense as a response to the limitations of the Moroccan media (which combines strong state influence with neoliberal tendencies). Morocco’s uprising, referred to as M20, used “Mamfakinch” (no concessions) as a slogan. Mamfakinch was developed as a citizen media portal, modelled over Nawaat. M20 was largely focused on reform of the existing political system. Protests were mostly planned online. The collective moves effectively between on and offline locations, supporting some campaigns and sparking others. Amina Filali was a 16 year old who swallowed rat poison after marrying her rapist. Protests took place in physical space and online to change the laws, and nearly two years after Filali’s death the laws that allowed rapists to escape prosecution if they married those they’d raped were changed. Mamfakinch was closed in 2014 after attack from a government-backed spyware attack and loss of momentum. Founders started the Association for Digital Rights (ADN), which is still attempting to register as an organisation. What began as an attempt to establish a viable opposition in Morocco has resulted in a restructuring of the norms of how Moroccans interact with power.

The Purchase of Witnessing in Human Rights Activism. Sandra Ristovska, University of Colorado Boulder. Witnessing is often associated with notions of ‘truth-telling’: this paper maps out two different modes of witnessing. Witnessing an event: bearing witness for historical and ethical reasons. Today, we a see a shift towards witnessing for a purpose. This second mode means that witnessing is very much shaped by a sense of strategic framing for a particular audience. If your end-goal is to appeal to a public audience, or a court, the imperatives are different: do you focus on a particular aesthetic, or on making sure that you get key details (such as badge numbers of police, or landmark shots to show where an event takes place). The push towards shaping witnessing towards particular audiences and institutional contexts can constrain, or oven silence, the voices of activists. Activists may feel they can’t let their own passion, or own voice, speak through as they attempt to meet institutional needs to be heard.

Citizen Media and Civic Engagement. Divya C. McMillin, University of Washington – Tacoma. This research examined the conditions that support particular forms of mobilisation and engagement on the ground: how do movements endure, and how do grassroots movements reclaim local spaces. There were two local case studies of grassroots tourism efforts which aim to preserve heritage and promote eco-friendly environments: Anthony’s Kolkata Heritage Tours, and Native Place in Bangalore. McMillin draws on Massey’s understanding of place as not already-existing, but as becoming – place is transformed by use. Indian cities are changing massively, with seven major Indian cities targeted for “megacity” or “smart city” development which makes them sites of urgent struggle for those living there. Using translation as a theoretical framework allows us to understand negotiations within the global economy: a translation of meaning through the opportunities of encounter. The way in which a space is translated into a place of consumption can also work to reclaim places in ways that the government doesn’t facilitate.

Whose Voices Matter? Digital Media Spaces and the Formation of New Publics in the Global SouthWhat Happens When the Subaltern Speaks?: Worker’s Voice in Post-Socialist China. Bingchun Meng, London School of Economics. It is important to emphasise the class dimension of how we understand the subaltern. Chinese migrant works can be understood as the subaltern (drawing on Sun 2014). The Hukou system divides and discriminates against the rural population. There is a concentration of symbolic resources and an exercise of epistemic violence, with the marginalisation of migrant workers within China. Migrant workers are represented as the other: the looming spectre of social slippage for the children of middle-class urban people, a force for social instability that needs to be contained. Xu Lizhi’s poetry explores the experiences of migrant workers (he committed suicide, working for Foxconn). Fan Yusu’s writing is, however, more well-known within China, and some is available in English translation. She’s in her mid-40s, from rural Hubei, and works in Beijing as a domestic helper. Her writing draws extensively on Chinese literary tradition, and demonstrates a strong egalitarian view. Responses to her writing have included an outpouring of sympathy from the urban middle-class (which positions the subaltern as disadvantaged); warnings from urban elites against mixing literary criteria with moral judgement (seeing the subaltern as uneducated); and criticism of Fan’s writing about her employer (seeing the subaltern as ungrateful). Fan Yusu’s responses to journalists are not always what they expect: for example, she refuses the valuing of intellectual over physical work.

Social Media and Censorship: the Queer Art Exhibition Case in Brazil. Michel Nicolau Netto, State University of Campinas, and Olívia Bandeira, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. [CN: homophobia.] Physical violence cannot be understood if we don’t take into account symbolic violence. As an emblematic example, we see the murder of Marielle Franco, which can be understood as a violent response to seeing the subaltern voice start to be valued. This research looks at the Queermuseum Art Exhibition. After the exhibition opened, a man visited wearing a shirt reading “I’m a sexist, indeed”, and recorded the video calling visitors names such as “perverted” and “pedophile” – he shared this on a right-wing Facebook group (“Free Brazil Movement”). After this was further shared, the Santander bank hosting the exhibition cancelled it. Posts about the exhibition were then shared even more widely: right-wing groups were empowered by their success. Most-shared posts in Brazil are disproportionately those from the right wing. The bank’s actions can be seen as a way of supporting the extension of neoliberalism in Brazil, via the strengthening of right-wing extremism.

Sound Clouds: Listening and Citizenship in Indian Public Culture. Aswin Punathambekar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This paper examines the centrality of sound in conveying voice. Sound technologies and practices serve as a vital infrastructure for political culture. The sonic dimensions of the digital turn have received comparatively little attention. This work disagrees with Tung-Hui Hu’s claims that the prehistory of the cloud is one of silences [I may have misunderstood this], focusing on Kolaveri – a song which was widely shared and remixed. Kolaveri became a sonic text that sparked discussion of inequality, violence, and caste.

Selfies as Voice?: Digital Media, Transnational Publics and the Ironic Performance of Selves. Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science. African digital users are often seen as being on the other side of the digital divide, not contributing to digital culture. This research looks at responses to boastful selfies from a Zimbabwean businessman, Philip Chiyangwa, mostly in Shona and aimed at discussion within the Zimbabwean diaspora (rather than aimed at an external public). There’s an online archive of 3000 images – often playful and ironic selfies and videos exploring the idea of zvirikufaya (“things are fine”). Discussions between diasporic and home-based Zimbabweans played with the history of colonisation, and reinforced or subverted the idea that diasporic Zimbabweans take on demeaning work overseas (for example, a woman in Australia filming herself being served in a cafe by a white man). Willems is keen to situate discussions of the transnational within a particular historical context, and to shift from ‘flowspeak’ to thinking more about mediated encounters. Diasporas can be seen as fundamentally postcolonial, understanding shifts as being responses specifically to the impacts of colonisation (“we are here because you were there” – A. Sivanandan). How do we understand the role of digital media in transnationalising publics?

Digital Constellations: The Individuation of Digital Media and the Assemblage of Female Voices in South Korea. Jaeho Kang, SOAS, University of London. We need to go beyond the limitations of ‘network’ theory, which reduce the social world to ‘actor-constellations’. One alternative is to understand protests in terms of assemblages of social individuals: non-conscious cognitive assemblages, collective individuation, and the connective action of affect, and non-representative democracy.

In the response, Nick Couldry invited us to think more about the metaphors around sound, including not only the sonic resonance, but also interference. We also need to think about the ways in which the theoretical language that we use reinforces neoliberal values, rather than subverting them.

Hashtag Activism#BlackLivesMatter and #AliveWhileBlack: A Study of Topical Orientation of Hashtags and Message Content. Chamil Rathnayake, Middlesex University, Jenifer Sunrise Winter, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Wayne Buente, University of Hawaii at Manoa.The use of hashtags can be seen within the context of collective coping, which can increase resiliency (while not necessarily leading to political change).

The Voices of #MeToo: From Grassroots Activism to a Viral Roar. Carly Michele Gieseler. Tarana Burke’s original goals for the #metoo mission can be seen as largely silenced (or pushed aside) as the roar grew around the hashtag, echoing broader patterns in white feminism. Outrage is selectively deployed – the wall between white women and Black women within feminism isn’t new, but perhaps the digital space can do something to change it. We need to think about the ways in which white feminisms within academia have ignored or appropriate the work of women of colour. Patricia Hill Collins talks about the painstaking process of collecting ideas and experiences of thrown-away Black women, even when these women started the dialogue.

Voice, Domestic Violence, and Digital Activism: Examining Contradictions in Hashtag Feminism. Jasmine Linabary, Danielle Corple, and Cheryl Cooky, Purdue University. This research looks at #WhyIStayed or #WhyILeft within a postfeminist lens, supplementing data gathered online with interviews. This research highlighted the importance of inviting voice (opening spaces for sharing experiences – but with a focus on the individual, which often lead to victim-blaming); multivocality (with openings for a multitude of identities – but this also opened up the conversation for trolling and co-opting); immediacy in action (which allows responses to current events); and the creation of visibility around domestic violence (unfortunately often neglecting broader structural context). Looking at these hashtags with reference to postfeminist contradictions allows both an understanding of how they were important for those participating, but also the limitations in the focus on the individual.

Women’s Voices in the Saudi Arabian Twittersphere. Walaa Bajnaid, Einar Thorsen, and Chindu Sreedharan, Bournemouth University. This research focuses on women’s resistance to the system of male guardianship, asking about how Twitter facilitate cross-gender communication during the campaign. Women’s tweets connected online and offline mobilisation, for example by posting videos of themselves walking in public unaccompanied. Protesters actively tried to keep the hashtag trending, and to gain international attention. Tweets from male opponents attempted to defend the status quo by attempting to derail the campaign, accusing the protesters of being atheists and/or foreign agents trying to destabilise Saudi Arabia. Men frequently seemed hesitant to support the campaign to end male guardianship.

The Mediated Life of Social Movements: The Case of the Women’s March. Katarzyna Elliott-Maksymowicz, Drexel University. This research draws on the literature on new social movement theory, collective identity, and visuality in social movements. Changing dynamics of hashtags and embedded images is a useful way of understanding how the movement changed over time.

Colonial Imaginations, Techno-Oligarchs, and Digital Technology(The discussion here was interesting and important, but I struggled a bit to take good notes given the flow of the format. Please excuse the especially fragmentary notes gathered under each presenter, as that seemed easier than taking notes following the flow of discussion.)

Discussant: Payal Arora, Erasmus University Rotterdam
We have to remember that colonial theory is buried in different areas, including development discourse. It’s also important that ‘the margins’ aren’t always positive – the extreme right were also once on the margins (though they are being brought to the centre in many places, including Brazil). Is identity politics toxic to our cause, or should we be leveraging aspects of it? When we talk about visibility in the Global South, we largely celebrate it (“They’ve gained visibility! They’re speaking for themselves!”), without recognising the complicated nature of different identities within nations. There’s a lot of talk about data activism and data justice – we need to also look at data resistance. How do we conceptualise resistance in a broader way without moralising it? We also need to think not just about values in design, but also about who the curators of design are (and how they are embedded within particular territorial spaces and power structures). We also need to think about who is operationalising design.

Digital Neo-Colonization: A Perspective From China, Min Jiang, University of North Carolina – Charlotte.Min Jiang talks about the challenge of working out: is China the colonised, or the coloniser? Looking at the role of large digital companies, we could see Google as colonising China…but also see Chinese companies as having largely replaced Google now, and as colonising Africa. China has its own colonial history. In China today, there’s been so much crackdown on resistance: colleagues in China working in journalism are forbidden for even mentioning the word resistance.

Islamic State’s Digital Warfare and the Global Media System, Marwan M. Kraidy, Annenberg, University of PennsylvaniaNorth American white supremacists use digital technologies to mess around with spatial perceptions. Social media platforms are working in tandem with all kinds of techniques of spatial control and surveillance. There’s something about the ways in which these platforms claim innocence from the kinds of feelings that they spark, and we shouldn’t release them from responsibility. Kraidy notes the environmental, social, and economic issues tied up in the ways that data works, using data centres that need to be air-conditioned as an example.

Non-Spectacular Politics: Global Social Media and Ideological Formation, Sahana Udupa, LMU MunichWe need to understand not just intersectional oppression, but also nested inequalities, and the ways in which the digital has lead to increased expressions of nationalism. A decolonial approach requires that we recognise the resurgence of previous forms of racism. Is digital media just a tool for discourses of racism and neonationalism that exist outside it? Udupa argues that we should see digital media cultures as inducing effects on users themselves. In India, Facebook is having a huge (but largely invisible) impact on politics. For example, the BJP uses data extensively in crafting particular political narratives.

Decolonial Computing and the Global Politics of Social Media platforms; Wendy Willems, London School of Economics and Political Science.
A decolonial approach means bringing back in structures, and seeing colonisation as fundamental (rather than additive) to processes of identity formation. It resists claims to speak ‘from nowhere’, and helps us to understand the global aspects of platforms. How might we understand the colonisation of digital space by platforms, including the extraction of data? These platforms are positioned as beneficial (‘connecting the unconnected’) – Willems mentions Zuckerberg visiting Africa in shorts and a t-shirt, the image of white innocence this portrays. There’s a challenge around provoking more discussion of these platforms in Africa. There’s a discussion of Internet shut-downs – the state is being seen as the enemy as it shuts down particular services, but we’re not turning the same critical eye on the platforms themselves. She also distinguished between the use of digital media in resistance, and resistance to digital media and datafication itself – there’s been less of the latter. In South Africa, there was #datamustfall in the wake of #RhodesMustFall (focusing on the costs of accessing digital media, rather than contesting platforms themselves). Operators are crucial gatekeepers in accessing the Internet – we need to look at the relationship between operators, platforms, and the state.

Media Representation of Cultural Symbols, Nationalism and Ethnic and Racial PoliticsFraming the American Turban: Media Representations of Sikhs, Islamophobia, and Racialized Violence. Srividya Ramasubramanian and Angie Galal, Texas A&M University.
Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world. Several waves of Sikh immigration to the US, with various degrees of control. There’s a history of hate crimes against Sikhs in the US, but disaggregated data only began to be collected (by the FBI) in 2015. Anti-Sikh views, and violence, is tied to the othering and dehumanization of Muslims. There’s a long history of negative portrayals of Sikhs (tangled in with Hindus and Muslims) before 9/11. Going on from this research, it’s also important to look at how Sikhs are resisting negative media portrayals. This research located three key moments of rupture in US media portrayals: 9/11, the Wisconsin shootings, and the Muslim Ban/Trump era.

Selfie Nationalism: Twitter, Narendra Modi, and the Making of a Symbolically Hindu/Ethnic Nation. Shakuntala Rao, SUNY, Plattsburgh.Modi‘s use of Twitter has been seen as particularly strategic, with extensive use of selfies. He always presents himself as someone who can speak to the layperson as “I”. Rao’s methods involve reading, rather than quantifying, tweets, including replies. For example, as soon as Modi starts ‘praying’ online, people upload videos of himself praying. He tweets in seven languages (using local languages when he travels), but mostly a combination of Gujarati, Hindi, and English. He portrays himself as a Hindu god – some people talk about the ‘banalisation of Hindutva’. Part of this is portraying “every Indian” as special. ‘Selfie Nationalism’ has four characteristisc: Modi’s personification of a symbolic self (and driven by him, not others); a rejection of plural religious/cultural narratives of India; a discourse with a short self life driven by optics as in the frequent launch of new policy initiatives (which are then discarded); less concern with media access and more by media use.

Representing the Divine Cow: Indian Media, Cattle Slaughter and Identity Politics Sudeshna Roy, Stephen F. Austin State University. What are discursive strategies used to generate, resist, sustain, or reify discourses of Hindu nationalism surrounding the Divine Cow? Modi has had a lifelong association with the Hindu nationalist organisation RSS. He has been providing the conditions to support the growth of violent identity politics. In 2014, as Gujrat chief minister, he started attacking the beef export industry. In 2017 he instituted a ban against small-time Muslim and low-caste Dalit, leather-workers. Some low-caste Dalit Hindus do eat beef. Roy notes that while we commonly understand culture as private, our common associations and larger context shape how we understand culture. There have been several cases of Hindu mobs murdering Muslim people for (allegedly) eating beef. Newspaper articles on these events frequently refer to the ceremonial, ritual, and religious roles of the cow, including its sanctity and ahimsa (harmlessness); and pastoral Khrishna. There is, however, no monolithic adherence to the sanctity of the cow for Hindus. There’s a forced conflation of private and public culture in the media’s coverage of the symbolic cow. Hindutva is being presented as a way of life.

Do We Truly Belong: Ethnic and Racial Politics of Post-Disaster News Coverage of Puerto Rico. Sumana Chattopadhyay, Marquette University. In surveys, only a very small majority of people in the mainland US knew that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. However, they can’t vote in the national elections, because they’re not represented in the Electoral College. US mainstream media coverage of Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico is like their coverage of foreign countries.

Narrating Voice and Building Self on Digital and Social Media‘This is Lebanon’: Narrating Migrant Labor to Resistive Public. Rayya El Zein, University of Pennsylvania. This research looks at the calling into being of an ideal political subject through social media. ‘This is Lebanon’ is a platform run by a Nepalese immigrant, Dipendra Upetry, where migrant workers have been sharing stories of labour abuses. The Lebanese system for migrant work is particularly conducive to labour abuses, as workers often have a ‘sponsor’ who they may also live with. El Zein is looking at how the voices of labourers affect the political imagination around what it means to be Lebanese. ‘This is Lebanon’ inverts a popular tourism hashtag, #thisislebanon, and when Lebanese citizens complain that “this isn’t Lebanon”, Upetry invites them to change working conditions if they want that to be true. The Kafa campaign, run by a Lebanon NGO in coordination with the International Labour Union, shared a series of ads about a young couple trying to decide what the right thing to do is regarding the person doing domestic work with them, imagining change as coming from educated middle class people who just need guidance. These are ideologically-inflected ideas of politics that position the individual as the mechanism of change.

Instagramming Persian Identity: Ritual Identity Negotiations of Iranians and Persians in/out of Iran. Samira Rajabi, University of Pennsylvania. This research came out of trying to understand why some people refer to themselves as Persians, and others as Iranians. Rajabi looked at how identity is being negotiated on social media, particularly Instagram, which led to exploring particularly the ways in which identity are written on women’s bodies. Many women were part of the Iranian revolution, but they were the first losers after the revolution. Trauma has had a huge impact on how identity is negotiated, and tactical media can be one way to respond to the deep symbolic trauma many people from Iran have experienced.

Hijacking Religion on Facebook. Mona Abdel-Fadil, University of Oslo. This focuses on the Norwegian Cross-Case – a newsreader tried to wear a cross while reading the news, and was told she was in breach of guidelines. There’s a Facebook group: “Yes to wearing the cross whenever I choose”. This is a good case study for understanding identity politics, the role of social media users in amplifying conflicts about religion, modes of performing conflict (and understanding who they are performing to), and the politics of affect. The Facebook group is dominated by conservative Christians who are worried about losing Norway’s Christian heritage; nationalists who see Norwegian identity as inextricably tied to Christianity; humanists (predominantly women) who try to bridge differences; fortified secularists, who argue ferociously, particularly against the nationalists; ardent atheists (predominantly men), who tend to be fan the flames by abusing religious people, then step back. The group is shaped by master narratives that require engagement: that wearing the cross is an act of defiance (often against Muslim attack); that Norwegian cultural heritage is under threat (with compliance from politicians). There’s an intensification and amplification of conflict, including distorting and adding to the original conflict. We need to understand that for some people this is entertainment – an attraction to the tension in the group, and how easy it is to inflame emotions.

Discussion session: Lilie Chouliaraki, in responding, noted the role of trauma and victimhood, inviting speakers to reflect on the role of victimhood and self-victimhood in constituting subjects and identities here. Rajabi noted that trauma requires a different level of response – the stakes are different. But trauma is medicalised, we treat it as something to be dealt with individually rather than politically. Abdel-Fadil is trying to work out how to write from a place of vulnerability about this: how to take the sense of suffering expressed by these people who feel like Christianity or Norwegian identity is under threat seriously, while not necessarily accepting that they are actually victims.

Digital Media and the Body

Drawing from Abigail Selzer King

Towards a theory of projectilic media: Notes on Islamic State’s Deployment of Fire. Marwan M. Kraidy, Annenberg, University of Pennsylvania. Kraidy asks why ISIS uses the symbolism of fire so frequently. There’s a distinction between digital images, operative images (for example, drone footages) that are part of an image; projectilic images (images as weapons); and prophylactic images (which build a sense of safety and security). In ISIS’s symbolism, fire becomes a metaphor for sudden birth and sudden death, for the war machine, and for flames of justice. Speed is essential to the war machine, and to fire. A one-hour ISIS video would have about half an hour of projectilic sequences. ISIS uses a torch as a metaphor for the war machine, and the hearth as a a metaphor for the utopian homeland. Fire activates new connections between words and images. Immolation confuses the customary chronology (for example, of beheading videos).

You Have Been Tagged: Incanting Names and Incarnating Bodies on Social Media. Paul Frosh, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tagging has become a prevalent technique for circulating images on social media, and serves various purposes for social media platforms (for example, adding more data). Naming and figuration are linked to the life of the self. Names aren’t just linguistic designators – they’re also signifiers of power. Names perform the entanglement of the social subject. Tagging requires a systematic circulation of the name (you must join the platform). Tagging interpolates us as subjects of a particular system, and revitalises the ancient magical power of action at a distance through naming. Tagging is a magical act of germination. Being tagged carries a social weight, prompting us to respond. Tagging sends social signals through others’ images, as opposed to selfies. Tagging goes against the grain of networked selfhood in digital culture, re-centring the body. Tagging is the fleshing out of informational networks.

Selfies as Testimonies of the Flesh. Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science. Aesthetic corporeality becomes important when we think about vulnerable bodies. Digital testimonies produced in conflict zones are elements of a broader landscape of violence and suffering. How does the selfie mediate the faces of refugees? What does the remediation of these faces in Western news sites tell us? Three types of images: refugees being photographed to take selfies; refugee selfies with global leaders; celebrities taking photos as if they were refugees. Chouliaraki notes that refugees taking selfies in Lesbos are celebrating not just having arrived, but also having survived the deadliest sea crossing. Refugee selfies are remediated through a series of disembodiments; their faces are, at best, an absent presence, or, at worst, fully absent.

Feminist Theorizations Beyond WesternCulturesOrientalism, Gender, and Media Representation: A Textual Analysis of Afghan Women in US, Afghan, and Chinese Media. Azeta Hatef, Pennsylvania State University and Luwei Rose Luqui, Hong Kong Baptist University. This study looks at media representations of women in Afghanistan, thinking about the purposes these images serve in relation the war on Afghanistan. Media coverage in China is controlled by the government, but soft news is offered a bit more leeway than hard news outlets. Nevertheless, in China mainstream media conveys the same theme: Afghan women oppressed by brown men. Both US and Chinese media portrays Afghanistan as backwards, with women’s freedoms entirely limited. While violence against women in Afghanistan is worthy of attention, but these media representations operate to amplify distinctions between “us” and “them”, justifying intervention (and failing to recognise the violence done by that intervention).

Production of subject of politics through social media: a practice of Iranian women activists. Gilda Seddighi, University of Bergen. This research looked at an Iranian online network of mourning mothers, drawing on Butler’s conceptualization of politicization. There was a group, “Supporters of Mourning Mothers Harstad”, composed mainly of asylum seekers, connected by Facebook and other mechanisms. Motherhood can be seen here as a source of recognition of political subjects across national border. The notion of motherhood was expanded to include children beyond their own. Nevertheless, many women interviewed spoke of their activism as apolitical, and belonging to a particular nation-state was taken for granted.

Subject Transformations: New Media, New Feminist Discourses. Nithila Kanagasabai, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. This research attempts to look at new strands of feminism in India, particularly in smaller towns in Tamil Nadu. Work from urban areas has tended to position Women’s Studies as urban, upper-caste, middle-class, English-speaking, online, and speaking for marginalised groups. Students who Kanagasabai interviewed drew on ‘the feminist canon’ (for example, Virginia Woolf, Shulamith Firestone), but also on little magazines – small local literary magazines in regional dialects of Tamil, which previously circulated predominantly among unemployed, educated men. These magazines have shifted to allow women, Dalits, and people from scheduled tribes to express themselves. Little magazines open space for subjectivity, offering a critique of seemingly universal social norms, including casteism and gender roles. Students interviewed mention these magazines alongside sources like Jstor and Economic and Political Weekly, which speaks to the development of new methodologies. Publishing in little magazines (as opposed to mainstream feminist journals) is seen not just as convenient, but also as a political decision. Moving online did not mean that little magazines transcended the local or temporal – readership remains limited and local, but they are still important spaces. Following feminists online has lead to a deeper everyday engagement with feminist literature. Lurking needs to be viewed within the framework of collaborative learning, and engagement can happen during key moments. Most students didn’t relate to the title of feminism (which they felt required a particular kind of academic competence), but instead related to women’s studies.

Emergent Voices in Material Memories: Conceptualizing Public Voices of Segregated Memories in Detroit. Scott Mitchell, Wayne State University. An eight-mile wall remains as a visible reminder of the history of segregation in Detroit, also serving as a space of education and hope. The wall was constructed by developers to raise property values for the White area by separating it from Black communities. Grassroots efforts to add a mural have shifted its meaning.

The Mnemonic Black Hole at Guantánamo: Memory and Counter-Memory Digital Practices on Twitter. Muira McCammon, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Guantánamo is often left off maps: Johann Stein has called it a “legal black hole”. McCammon tried to go to the library at Guantánamo for detainees – being unsuccessful, she tried following the Joint Task Force for Guantánamo on Twitter. McCammon asks what some of the mnemonic strategies used on the Twitter feed are. Only images of higher-up command and celebrities are posted. Traces of Guantánamo as a ‘space of exception’ have been deleted (for example, tweets noting the lack of Internet connection). The official ‘memory maker’, when posting on Twitter, can’t escape others’ memory-making (for example, responses to an official tweet about sexual harassment training at Guantánamo which pointed out the tremendous irony). When studying these issues, there are few systematic ways to track and trace digital military memory makers.

The Voice of Silence: Practices of Participation Among East Jerusalem Palestinians. Maya de Vries, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This research focuses on participation avoidance, for example the boycotting of Facebook over the ways in which it censors Palestinian content, as an active form of resistance. de Vries notes the complexity of power relations in working with Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Interviewees choose not to engage in anything political on Facebook, knowing that it is monitored by the Israeli state. This state monitoring affects their choices around Facebook. There is also kinship monitoring – knowing that family are reading. Self-monitoring also plays a role. One interviewee notes that when she had to put her location down, there was no option for “East Jerusalem, Palestine”. These layers of monitoring mean that Palestinians negotiate their engagement with Facebook cautiously, frequently choosing non-participation.

Voices of Freedom, Voices of Constraint: Race, Citizenship and Public Memory – Then and NowSelected Research: “The Fire Next Time in the Civil Sphere: Literary Journalism and Justice in America 1963. Kathy Roberts Forde, Associate Professor, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. After the end of slavery, new systems were put in place to control Black people, and exploit their labour. Black resistance continued, building a vibrant Black public sphere and paving the way for the civil rights movement. James Baldwin wrote that the only thing that White people had that Black people needed was power. White people should not be a model for how to live. White people destroyed, and were destroying, thousands of lives, and did not know it, and did not want to know it. Baldwin’s writing was hugely influential.

Selected Research: Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965, 2017. Sid Bedingfield, Assistant Professor, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Talks about NAACP leader Roy Wilkins’ 1964 opinion piece complaining about Black youth crime. This had parallels with segregationists’ narratives, and Wilkins’ had cordial communications with some segregationists. These narratives stripped away historical context and ongoing oppression when covering Black protests and expressions of anger and frustration.

Selected Research: Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon, 2017, 2nd edition; Rebel Media: Adventures in the History of the Black Public Sphere, In Progress; Jane Rhodes, Professor and Department Head, African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago. Almost everything Rhodes finds in the discourses of the 1960s is still relevant today in discourses of nationalism and race. Stuart Hall argues that each surge of social anxiety finds a temporary respite in the projection of fears onto compellingly anxiety-laden themes – like moral panics about Black people and other racialised others. US coverage of Britain in the 1960s tended to frame Britain as having issues with race, but an unwillingness to deal with it. Meanwhile, British press seemed to have almost a lurid fascination with racial violence in the US (with an undercurrent of fear for white safety in the US, and subsequently in Britain). Deep-seated anxieties around race and social change aren’t subtle. As Enoch Powell came to power, media seemed to be tangled in debates about whether US or UK racism was worse.

My rough and very incomplete notes from the first day of ICA. There were a bunch of interesting points that I haven’t noted because I was distracted or tired or too busy listening, and great papers that I sadly missed. I mostly use these notes to follow up on work later, but if they’re useful to you too, that’s great!

Understanding Kurdish Media and Communications: Space, Place and MaterialityTheaters of Inhibition and Cinemas of Strategy: Censorship, Space, and Struggle at a Film Festival in Turkey. Josh Carney, American University of Beirut, spoke about Bakur (North), a film about the everyday life of PKK guerrillas. When the Turkish government banned screenings of Bakur, people met at the theatres anyway to discuss the censorship. The directors of Bakur will go on trial in a few days for ‘terrorist propaganda’. Struggles over censorship were tied to struggles over the city space of Istanbul, perhaps in response to the Turkish government’s attempts to erase ideas and spaces that it finds disagreeable. The government wanted to erase Bakur because it was a testament to the peace process, and to the government’s withdrawal from it. This censorship can be seen as an attempt to erase the promise and possibility of peace.

Cinematic Spaces of Solitude, Exile, and Resistance: Telling Kurdish Stories from Norway, Iran, and Turkey. Suncem Koçer, Kadir Has University, spoke on Kurdish filmmaking as a transnational platform for identity politics. Bahman Ghobadi talks about Kurds as a people on the move, and says that cinema as the art of movement is therefore the most suitable medium for documenting Kurdish stories.

Infrastructures, Colonialism and Struggle. Burce Celik, Loughborough University, argues that Kurdish transnational media is still embedded in historical, political, and territorial contexts. Technical and economic concerns, as well as national borders, also shape networks. State interventions can take place at multiple levels. For example, while the Turkish government may not be able to stop television transmissions from Europe, there are reports of police smashing satellite antennas in Kurdish villages. While there are no country-wide Internet shut-downs, there have been region-wide shut-downs in Kurdish provinces of Turkey. We need to consider the materiality of media infrastructures.

Questions: I asked if there were attempts to shift film screenings and other spaces that had been shut down online. Carney noted that film-makers were very resistant to doing this, as film screenings and movie festivals were seen as important. Bakur was leaked online, and the directors asked that people didn’t share or watch it. Koçer affirmed this, and said that censorship in a way also served a generative purpose for film-makers.

Racism in Digital Media Space

Racism in the Hybrid Media System: Analyzing the Finnish ‘Immigration Debate’Gavan Titley, University of Helsinki. Mervi Pantti, U of Helsinki and Kaarina Nikunen, U of Tampere. Pantti opens by noting that even naming racism as racism is often contentious. ‘Hybra’ project – looking at understandings of racism shaped and contested in the interactive everyday cultures of digital media. This paper looks particularly at Suomi24, ‘Finland 24’, one of the largest non-English-language commenting site online. Anti-racist activism in the 1990s helped to fix racism in the public imagination as a result of movements of people, rather than deeper structures. ‘Racism’ is used broadly in Finnish public discourse to mean ‘discrimination’ (for example, ‘obesity racism’), which removes it from it’s particular context. Conservatives talk about “opinion racism”: claims that journalists and others with a ‘multicultural agenda’ are intolerant of other viewpoints. Politically, it’s very difficult to mobilise in terms of racism and anti-racism because of the ways in which this language works.

More Than Meets the Eye: Understanding Networks of Images in Controversies Around Racism on Social Media. Tim Highfield, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez, Queensland University of Technology. This research, focused on everyday visual representations of racism and counter-racism practices, comes out of the wider literature on racism online that have largely focused on text. It draws on Matamoros-Fernandez’s conceptual work around platform racism. This article looks at the online responses to Adam Goodes’ war cry, many of which used images as a way to push the boundaries for racist viewpoints (often via homophobia). Indigenous social media users frequently added their own images to push back against the racism expressed against Goodes. Mainstream media, though, frequently reinforced hegemonic discourses of racism, rather than giving space to Indigenous voices. There were salient practices on Twitter that are interesting when thinking about platform racism: visual call-outs of racism, often of which were a way of performing distance from Australian racism, which had the effect of amplifying racism. Rather than performing ‘white solidarity’ by amplifying racism, it would be useful to do more to share Indigenous voices and critiques of racism, and link this particular incident to broader structures of racism in Australian society. Visual cultures are an opportunity to understand cover and everyday racism on social media platforms. Even with changes introduced by various platforms to combat racism (after user pressure), there is a lack of consistency and transparency in responses to platformed racism.

Theorising Online Racism: The Stream, Affect and Power Laws. Sanjay Sharma, Brunel University. Racialism isn’t an individual act, it’s embedded in material techno-social relations. Ambient racism creates an atmosphere of background hostility. Microaggressions may seem isolated and minor, but they can be all-pervasive.

Working it Out: Emergent Forms of Labor in the Global Digital EconomyNothing left to lose: bureaucrats in Googleland: Vicki Mayer, Tulane. Stories about Google’s centrality to the economy are highly mediated, even for those working within the organisation. Bureaucrats aren’t meant to sell Google, but they have been pushed to ‘samenwerking’ (planned collaboration) to ‘solve problems’ individually with little structural support. Interviewees used the word “innovative” most often to describe how workers were trying to do more varied tasks with less time and money, while also trying to publicise their achievements. New companies come in all the time saying that they’ll create thousands of jobs, but with limited real results.

Developing a Farmworker Low-Power Radio Station in Southern California. Carlos Jimenez, University of Denver. Local Indigenous workers speak Mixteco and Zapotec (sp?) (which is very different from English and Spanish), and listen to Chilena songs – no radio stations in Oxnard catered to this language or musical tastes. The Mexteco Indigena Community Organizing Project partnered with the community. When there was an application made for Radio Indígena for a relatively low-powered antenna, another station fifty miles away, KDB93.7PM, registered a complaint. At first Radio Indígena organisers called to ask them to remove their complaint, but they refused until they received a letter from farmworkers in the area. After a while, the radio community wanted to try shifting towards online transmissions rather than through the radio antenna. But they found that farmworkers’ typical data plans would stop them from listening in. The cost of new media technologies place a greater burden on individual listeners, rather than on the broadcaster.

Production, moderation, representation: three ways of seeing women of color labor in digital culture, Lisa Nakamura, University of Michigan. The lower you go in the chain of production, the more people who aren’t white men you see. It is useful to ask whose labour we misattribute to white men, or even algorithms, on digital platforms. US digital work has been both outsourced and insourced, including to women on reservations. Fairchild ‘invaded’ reservations, and was one of the largest employers in the Navajo Nation until resistance to firings from the American Indian Movement, and unionisation, lead to them leaving. The plant there had produced “high reliability” components, which needed very low failure rates. Employing Navajo workers allowed Fairchild to pay less than the minimum wage. Workers were told that they were building parts for televisions, radios, calculators, and so on (with military applications not mentioned). In a current analogue, moderation work on sites like Facebook is outsourced, sometimes to volunteers. We might also look at the ways in which people like Alexis Ohanian (of Reddit) took credit for the work of teenager Rayouf Alhumedhi in the creation of a hijab emoji.

Riot Practices: Immaterial Labor and the Prison-Industrial Complex. Li Cornfeld, Amherst College. There’s a ‘mock prison riot’ at the former state penitentiary in Moundsville yearly, which is a combination of a trade show and a training exercise for ‘correctional officers’. This isn’t what we think of when we consider ‘tech events’, but we should take its claims to be a tech event seriously. It’s a private event, with global attendees. This is one of the ways in which the US exports its technologies of control and norms. It’s also a space to incorporate participants in the tech development process (for example, adding cords to radios for places where batteries are scarce). Technologies of control aren’t just weapons, they include phones, wristbands, and other tracking technologies – many of these are marketed as being not just for prisons, but also for other settings, such as hospitals.

Moving Broadband From Sea to Land: Internet Infrastructure and Labor in Tanzania. Lisa Parks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Parks wanted to understand how internet moves from sea to land, and what kinds of digital labor exist in Tanzania to help carry out these operations. She spoke to people who are both formal and informal IT workers, often carrying out risky forms of labour to make the internet more widely available. Drawing on Vicki Mayer, and Labato and Thomas’ The Informal Media Economy. IT ‘development’ projects often lead to unused infrastructure – technology that’s in place, but left unpowered, disconnected, in need of assembly or repair. In Bunda, there are people working in vital jobs like repairing or charging phones. The cost of charging phones is scaled by income. Mobile phone repair workers have designed their own phone which they are going to ask Foxconn to manufacture.

Public Scholars: Engaging With Mainstream Media as Activism

This was a panel discussion, with Amy Adele Hasinoff, University of Colorado Denver; Charlton McIlwain, New York University; Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology; Victor W. Pickard and Maria Repnikova, Georgia State University. The benefits of media engagement aren’t always direct and obvious – sometimes, for example, they connect unexpected groups and help build alliances. Framing material for a public audience with interventions from editors can be useful in thinking about how we communicate our research, including to other academics outside our own disciplines. Speakers were unsure about the benefits of engaging in hostile spaces – are there useful ways to engage with right-wing media, for example?

There was a lot of interest in the potential issues with engaging with the media. People’s experiences with engaging has differed – some speakers had been discouraged for engaging too much, others felt it was seen as a fundamental part of their job. However, there can be a problem keeping a balance between public scholarship (including dealing with hostile responses) and more traditional academic outputs. It’s important to discriminate between ‘high value’ engagement opportunities and junk.

University support for academics under attack can vary – sometimes they’ll provide legal support, but this isn’t necessarily reliable (or publicised). You’ll often only find out what the university responses to these issues are when a problem comes up. Many of the attacks academics face when speaking publicly aren’t necessarily overt: they might include subtle red-baiting, or questioning about how your background (for example, noting Maria Repnikova’s Russian surname) impacts on your ideas.

There were suggestions for those starting out with media engagement and not yet inundated with media requests:

Make sure your colleagues know that you’re interested in media engagement: they should be passing on relevant media queries;

Actively contact media when you have research that’s relevant and important – this might involve proposing stories to journalists/editors, or tweeting at journalists.

Have useful research to share (especially quantitative data).

How not to get fired? You can’t avoid making any controversial statements – if the press decide to go after you, they will. But aim to have evidence to back your point up, and hopefully aim to also have solidarity networks. (I’d add: maybe join your union!)

When engaging with the media, consider the formats that work for you: text, radio, or television?

Activism, Social Justice and the Role of Contemporary ScholarshipSasha Costanza-Chock, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Out of the Shadows, into the Streets!was the result of hands-on, participatory media processes. There isn’t a divide between scholarship and working with social justice organisations: it makes the work more accountable to the people working on the ground, and to their needs. Work with Out for Change led Costanza-Chock to shift their theoretical framework to one of transformative media: it’s about media-making as a healing and identity-forming process.

Kevin Michael Carragee, Suffolk University, began by making a distinction between activist scholarship and scholarship on activism. The former requires establishing partnerships with organisations and movements – there are more calls for this than actual examples. Carragee talked about his work with the Media Research and Action Project. One of the lessons of MRAP is that you want to try to increase the resources available to the group you’re working with. We need to recognise activists as lay scholars. Activists and scholars don’t share the same goals, discourses, and practices – we need to remember that.

Rosemary Clark-Parsons, The Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark-Parsons draws on feminist standpoint theory: all knowledge is contextually situated; marginalised communities are situated in ways that give them a broader view of power relations; research on those power relations should begin with and centre marginalised communities. To do participatory research, we must position ourselves with activists, but we have to be reflexive about what solidarity means and what power relationships are involved. It’s important to ground theory in practitioners’ perspectives.

Jack Linchuan Qiu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, talked about the problems with the ‘engagement and impact’ framework, which doesn’t consider how our work has an impact, and to what ends. We need to have hope. As academics we have the luxury of finding hope, and using our classrooms and publications to share that hope.

Chenjerai Kumanyika, Rutgers University – School of Communication and Information. This kind of research offers a corrective to some of the tendencies that exist in our field. Everything Kumanyika has done that’s had an impact has been an “irresponsible job decision”. We have to push back against the priorities of the university, which are about extending empire. We have to push back against understanding class just as an identity parameter, as opposed to a relation between struggles. We need to sneak into the university, be in but not of it.

It was a wrench leaving this final panel of the day, but I had to go meet my partner and Nonsense Baby, so sadly I left before the end.

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